Happy New Year!

Individual Mysticism

"...anyone wishing above all to avoid the religious dimension should consider that the intense individualism which has focused our attention exclusively on the social-contract model is itself thoroughly mystical. It has glorified the individual human soul as an object having infinite and transcendent value, has hailed it as the only real creator, and has bestowed on it much of the panoply of God."

             ----Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, Ch. 18, pg. 189-90.

Oh

NYPD Has a Dream

One Line Poem

Still carousels taunt indifferent stars.

Song

Despite vastness above the Universe is finite.

Lucid silence overwhelms, measure's hand indicts.

From our first beat to the cry of tongue

Beginning is the end of song.


     

John Brennan, Bi-Partisan Global Crime Lord/Lackey: Obama's Head of the CIA, Supporter and Participant in Torture Program under George W. Bush. Architect of Obama's Signature Drone Strike and Extra-Judicial Drone Strike and JSOC Assassination Policies.

"Speak to them boldly and you rouse anger and resentment with your candor, while deference and humility only make them suspicious. Deal with them honestly and they think they are being insulted, approach them humbly and they think they are being tricked. They take criticism much worse than others, being tyrants after all; but praise they don't like because they doubt its sincerity. Where the greatest benefit of all is concerned, a tyrant is the most impoverished, because he can never hope to know real warmth and friendship. Keepers of savage lions will sooner feel affection for those brutes than tyrants will be loved by their sycophants and petitioners."
---Dio Chrysostom, Oration 6.

"It's True, You're Lazy"

Thank You

Community

A Great "Bi-Partisan" Achievement(Featuring Larry Summers, President Bill Clinton)

Prepared to Escalate Role of Victim of Congressional Obstruction

"My own achievements may not be particularly praiseworthy, for they are trifles, but my intentions, I feel, are commendable even among the gods, for I lamented and wept, and outdid you in grief."
---Libanius, Letters, 140.

Alas, the Cold Season Arrives

Flowers

Funk

LOL

Soul

Pop Perfection

The Truth

Bigotry of Every Stripe Championed by Professional Sports Fans in America

Harold Pinter, "Art, Truth, and Politics"

Theology and Economy

     "To cope with this paradox reverently without attempting to resolve it rationalistically, the tradition of Greek Christian thought, which also used the word in its most general, usual sense(as we have been doing here, too), distinguished theology, as the doctrine of the Godhead as God, from economy, the doctrine of the historical dispensations of God in dealing with the human race and the world, through the creation, through the history of Israel, and above all through the incarnation of the Son of God, theology pertained to the language of the creed describing him as 'God out of God, light out of light'; economy pertained to its language about the events that took place 'for our salvation', beginning with his incarnation."

    ----Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture(The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism), Pt Two, Ch. 17, "The Economy of Salvation".

This Jam Still Sounds Fresh

http://www.mojvideo.com/video-prince-alphabet-street/da77abff6890b9804887

Bill Maher is the Anders Breivik of Comedy

Frightening this level of arrogance, stupidity, and bigotry is applauded by people.

Leader of World's Greatest Armer and Financier of Terrorism and Arms Dealer to Nations that Fund Terrorism Lectures UN General Assembly on Fighting Evil of Terrorism

Vide quod possit improbitas et nequitia, ut cum eius esse exstinctam vim ad laedendum credas, reviviscat.
Momus, Book IV, Leon Battista Alberti.

"Autumn Stone"

"God Doesn't Belong to the Yankee Dollar"

Mission Accomplished!

"My Fellow Americans, a few publicity stunts by a terror group our partners in the region and ourselves have created has allowed me to convince you bombing Syria is appropriate---of course bombing Iraq is never an issue."

Moon Drops Blue

ISIS, Al Qaeda 2.0(Improved Model to Terrify People into Supporting Never-ending Wars Profitable for Contractors, Energy Cartels, and Banks)

Who else had US-made stinger missiles? Losing Stinger Missiles and having other US arms "accidentally" fall into the wrong hands is great for business.

Sing It

Baldwin on "Looters"

Super Moon, Perseid Tails

Super Moon, Tree Branches

Super Moon, Perseid Trails

"So I get to bomb Iraq too?" "Good one Barack!" (laughter)

"I am a firestarter..."

"We're all riders on this train"

Obama and the US Congress Wholeheartedly Supports and Arms People Who Believe Genocide is "Permissible"

Super Moon Falls

For You

Chaplin, "Monsieur Verdoux"

Self Portrait with Philosopher's Stone and Cane

"Lead the mind, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible realities."
---Basil of Caesarea

Happy 4th

White Supremacists Block Busloads of Children and Women Arriving at Detention Center to Start Deportation Process in California

"It will confirm me bold; the child o'th'Court.
Let blushes dwell i'th'country."
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy, Act 1, Scene 3.

The Damned

"A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this."

                  R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Siena

Urbs Senarum in Etruria admodum nobilis est, et agrum late patentem possidet.
--- Pope Pius II, Commentaries.

No Kidding

Plus de Miracle

The small but abiding shock 
of apprehending bodies 
dispense with agency.

Children speak love
without prompting.

Birds sing at three hands
past the witching hour.

Marvels of otherwise
unremarkable days.

Bodies

   
"Daily habit makes one forget that one has a body that is equally subject to all the laws of destruction in the physical world as is a piece of wood that we saw or cut in pieces, and that the body moves in accordance with the same laws as any other physical machine constructed by human beings. --Only on certain occasions do we become sharply aware that our body is a physical object which can be destroyed--and then we are frightened at ourselves, suddenly feeling that we supposed ourselves to be something we are not, and that instead we are something that we fear to be."

                                          ---- Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser, Part Three.   

"For You"

Satire

"The best are convicted as the worst strut with impunity."




Under scolding heaven
handless men kill.
Mars seduced the God
he cuckolded, then
placed his divine consort
in southern California.
The Goddess, heels grown high,
inspires play which
seduces doe-eyed mortals
to His terrible craft.

Diagnosis

     "The disease of reason is that reason was born from man's urge to dominate nature, and the 'recovery' depends on insight into the nature of the original disease, not on a cure of the latest symptoms. The true critique of reason will necessarily uncover the deepest layers of civilization and explore its earliest history. From the time when reason became the instrument for domination for human and extra-human nature by man---that is to say, from its very beginnings---it has been frustrated in its own intention of discovering the truth. This is due to the very fact that it made nature a mere object, and that it failed to discover the trace of itself in such objectivization, in the concepts of matter and things not less than in those of gods and spirit. One might say that the collective madness that ranges today, from the concentration camps to the seemingly most harmless mass-culture reactions, was already present in germ in primitive objectivization, in the first man's calculating contemplation of the world as a prey. Paranoia, the madness that builds logically constructed theories of persecution, is not merely a parody of reason, but is somehow present in any form of reason that consists in the mere pursuit of aims."

                    ------Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, (176; ch. V).

Venerie

A name for the air and nothing more

Spleen 68

The cock silent as lace and slow rain,
parce que personne sacks empty palaces.

Communard bones shook en rage
as students above ground
called their tombs la plage.

Banks where pretty women
smiled wide as boulevards,
singing slogans,
their eyes on young men who,
cent ans avant, buried reds sous les pavés.

Realists effaced the possible
avec Lacan flooded lacunae.

Entering the palace,
cocks, loud as ever,
crow.
               
                  In every intime non
                    grave reds heard
                         Foucault.

To Me

Atropos

             I
Above
crisp sails swell full cheek.

In white cloth,
                               bright as scant cloud
                               crossing Sun,
I pace the deck.

          II
Run blind
 threadless youth,
        heels break in time.

Hooked by form's lure,
she cuts livelier lines.

Spring Forward

Spring Fog, Black Bird at Margin

NATO Exists to Nurture Fascism in Europe

Leaders of Nations Bankrolling and Arming Fascism Cheering Their Efforts

Appointed Fascist PM of Italy with Cabinet

Fascist Leader of Spain Receives Support of President of World's #1 Fascist Financier of Fascism

Ukraine

Hungary

Greece

"The poor could live here too..."

"Nothing like the way it feels..."

h/t  www.blckdgrd.com

Dickens Never Gets Old

     "The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered,---the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes, ---a tavern where there was nothing to pay,---a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, all the year round,---a brick and mortar Elysium where it was all play and no work. 'Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; 'we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all in no time.' So they established the rule, that all poor people should have, the alternative(for they could compel nobody, not they,) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water, and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three of thin gruel a-day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no telling how many applicants for relief under these last two heads would not have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse. But they were long-headed men, and they had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people."

                  ---------- Dickens, Oliver Twist, Book I, Chapter 2.




                                       

This Little Angel Turns 3 Today

Clouds, Heavenly Gossamer

Rise, my sisters, Clouds eternal,
Shining bright with morning dew,
From the roaring Ocean's bosom
To the sky, the world to view.

-----Aristophanes, The Clouds, Act I, Scene 2.

"Electricity is dangerous when it is raw."

The Fascists in Ukraine Have an Old Friend

"Western Capital will liberate you as it has Iraq, Afghanistan, Estonia, Libya, etc.!"

Manicured Lawnzilla

"It is not impossible to witness an abnormal deviation in the hidden or visible operations of the laws of nature."
-----Lautreamont, Le Chants de Maldoror, Book IV, 7.

Bright Blue Seas Above

So that, above in yonder place,
Where love abides, and all is rest,
All we may be forever blest.

---Confessio Amantis, John Gower.

Contra Contract, Love's Work

Turbines spin dominion.
The seductive hum
of articulate current
promises heaven.

Dour knaves rouse jaded monks.
Seasoned moths know better
than to singe wings in fire.

Burnt skin skies
flush my love's eyes
weeping cinders.

No politics or apology,
I'm in love with this world.
It blooms bright
as skin burns.

All turmoil,
turbines' hum,
washed away by
warm blood.